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Mark Weisbrot: Valenzuela Speech Suggests U.S. Will Blame Zelaya

Yesterday, President Obama's new top State Department official for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, delivered a speech about Honduras at the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States. The speech provides some important information about the State Department's strategy going forward. As before, this strategy is oriented toward legitimizing the coup government.

It appears that the State Department is still clinging to the October 30th "accord," and not just the "elections" to legitimize the government. So perhaps they still have hopes of reaching a deal with Zelaya after the election, or they are just pretending that they have such hopes, but one of these two things is the implication in this speech. When Zelaya refuses to be part of the farce, the implication here is that Washington will blame Zelaya for rejecting the implementation of the "accord." (This of course is despite the fact that Micheletti torpedoed the accord immediately by declaring himself head of the "unity government.") I would think that they Obama administration could also win Republican support for this position, even people like Senator DeMint, thus closing the gap that some of the administration seems to worried about on the domestic front.

Their problem remains that practically no other country in the world is buying their line.

Those who would like to make up "new" and "improved" ways to amend the constitution of Honduras are the ones who are becoming irrelevant to the politics in Honduras.

Honduras is a two major political party country similar to the United States.

The guy hiding in the Brazilian embassy in Honduras was nominated by, and Elected President as the candidate of one of those parties. In his case it was the Liberal Party.

The congress of Honduras is also currently controlled by the Liberal party.

The current defacto President is a member of the same Liberal political party.

The Liberal party candidate for President was nominated by the political party of the guy hiding in the Brazilian embassy before he, the guy hiding in the Brazilian embasy, was forced out of office and replaced by the Supreme Court and Congress of Honduras.

Both the member of the Liberal Party running for President, and the Member of the Liberal party who was the head of congress, supported the removal of the then President who was from their same political party, the Liberal party. Why? Because he was trying to illegally change the constitution of Honduras which they had all taken an oath to defend. A member of the same Liberal Party was selected by congress to replace the guy hiding in the Brazilian embassy after he was removed by order of the Supreme Court of Honduras.

The Liberal party candidate for President was ahead in the polls before the guy he was trying to replace, a member of his own party, decided to make up a new and improved way to change the constitution of Honduras.

The Liberal party is still participating in the election and hopes to still win the Presidency again. The Liberal party candidate supported the removal of the guy currently hiding in the Brazilian embassy ( the crazy guy from his same party ).

Those who would like to illegally change the constitution are claiming a wide spread boycott of the election by the opposition political parties. This is at best misleading - the only parties even considering boycotting are minor parties that get less than 10% of the vote historically and never had a chance to win any way. The party of the guy hiding in the embassy, the Liberal Party, IS NOT boycotting and they still hope to win.

Either the liberal candidate or the conservative candidate will win the election in a few days and one or the other will be the elected President of Honduras starting in January.

The guy hiding in the Embassy, may, or may not, get back in office, under adult supervision to avoid any more attempts to illegally change the Honduran constitution, for some period of time before January.

But his dreams of illegally changing the constitution while he is the elected President of Honduras are history.